Re: [xsl] Quasi-Literals and XML

[Uche Ogbuji <uche dot ogbuji at fourthought dot com>]

> I agree with you there. But that quote continues by saying that the most
> damaging fact about XSL is that it is not Turing-complete and is therefore
> severely restricted in the transformations it can express. 
> 
> My point is that in the first place the statement that XSL is not
> Turing-complete is debatable

Correct.

> in the second place I'm not convinced that XSL
> is severely restricted in the possible transformations

It isn't.  Of course, part of this depends on the context of "severely 
restricted".  If all you need to ever do is translate Java to Python, then I 
guess you could probably say that XSLT is "severely restricted" as far as you 
were concerned.

> and in the third
> place I wonder whether there is a causal relationship between lack of
> turing-completeness of XSL and restrictions in possible transformations. 

Nope.  Regular expression processing, for instance, is not Turing complete, 
but I'd scof at anyone who called REs "severely restricted".


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python



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